IE7′s uninstaller sucks

I installed a “Yarr, me hearty!” version of Interweb Explorer 7 Beta 3 to test out if any of my Blog’s skins work any better in it over IE6. Upon successful installation it asked me to reboot. I mean, who does that these days? Then ofcourse, I remembered what I was installing. Interweb Explorer. It’s like, an INTEGRAL part of the OPERATING SYSTEM and what not. So I unwillingly rebooted and lo and behold my Explorer was updated.
One small problem:

I’ll give you a minute to mull over what may or may not be missing from the image. Did you spot it? Did you find Wally (or Waldo if you are Americanish)? That’s right! No tabs! Not only that, no toolbar menu at all to see if I can turn these elusive “tabs” on or off.
After browsing the interweb a while I found that I can press ALT and the menu will appear. Why I didn’t think of that earlier is beyond me. Maybe the whole “out of sight, out of mind” concept coming in to play, because the toolbar wasn’t visible, I didn’t think of pressing ALT to access the toolbar.
I browsed the menus and the options to see if I did have “tabs” turned off or some such. But it wasn’t just tabs, it was the whole second tier toolbar. You know, the favourites, RSS Feeds, random buttons that I never use and such.
So I gave up trying to find the unfindable and scooted over to localhost to try out these bad mamajamas that I call skins in what’s apparently the final beta of IE7.
The browser was quite de-functionalized™ without the second tier toolbar, and almost felt like I wasn’t browsing the web, just simply viewing it through dorky glasses that I need to constantly push up because they are so heavy my geeky little nose just can’t hold them up.
I was quite suprised to find that they (The IE-Team) had actually improved IE somewhat, and styles (skins) that didn’t work to it’s fullest-of-awesomeness in IE6, actually worked suprisingly well in IE7.
Unfortunately, there were still a considerable ammount of bugs in the layouts that now worked better, and as such only one (1) of the skins got the IE7 Seal of Approval. I won’t tell you which one, you’ll have to visit the skins page to find out.

NEW PARAGRAPH!
I decided to nix (not *nix, as I know atleast one of you instantly thought) the Interweb Viewer and send it’s digital bits to parts unknown. So I ran the uninstaller (from the Run dialog because I’m so uber leet). The uninstall program was so amazing. What it did was lag my system for a couple of seconds, crash everything that was running at the time and rebooted my computer. It didn’t actually uninstall the program, but it did manage to whipe every single fucking foobar2000 playlist I had clean. That’s right. The ubercrash killed my Foobar. I now have one (1) playlist (Zero 7 of course, which I was quite suprised to find is actually my most played artist, thanks to my rarely-visited Last.fm account) and a defunct IE7 beta that I really don’t want any more.
I’m not sure who I should sue, Microsoft for building such a dodgy uninstaller that doesn’t actually work and destroys my music collection (well, just the playlists, but still I put a lot of work in to those babies) or Foobar, for making such a volatile playlist manager.

In related news, looks like I’m going to have to remove Opera from every single skin compatability listing, simply because it doesn’t stick. That’s right. It doesn’t like my cookie. I mean sure, I’m no Girl Scout, but my cookies are damn fine. Who’s Opera to deny my cookie? I love Opera so, and if Firefox wasn’t so extensable it would be my browser-of-choice. I’ll look in to this issue a little more, but probably only for about five minutes, because I have two new episodes of Nightmares and another Blade episode, not to mention I have an oncoming headache so my attention span will be pretty deprived I’d say.

In LIFE news this week, I managed to re-enroll to TAFE quite successfully. Go Team! This means I have another year of study before I’ll be rid of the loomy red building with horrible monitors. This semester I’m doing several crap topics that I invariabley failed the first time ’round, these include but are not limited to; Ethics, Privacy, Safety and Security, and embarassingly, “Recording Audio”. I managed to fail Audio the first time around because I forgot to hand up my final project. The lecturer saw it and everything, but he had to fail me because I forgot to formally hand it up. Such is life. So once I’m done with these Crap Topics I’m on to “Advanced Diploma in IT”, at whichpoint (presuming I don’t forget to hand anything up) I’ll have successfully aquired my Certificate IV (four for the retards) in IT, a Diploma in Multimedia, and an Advanced Diploma in Multimedia. Then all I’ll need is an office where I can hang all these pieces of paper. Maybe I should drudge up my High School Certificate and hang that up too. It’s important to let people know you have an edumacationism.

In GAMING news, holy fucking shit@Portal and Team Fortress 2. Both of which apparently come FREE(!) with Half-Life 2: Episode 2. Seeing that I didn’t get Episode 1, and it probably matters to know wtf happened between HL2 and Episode 2, I’m probably going to be buying both episodes. I wonder if they’ll give users that buy both episodes at the same time discount. Knowing VALVe (as intimately as I do) they’ll probably have a special pre-order period with 10% off like they do with, oh I don’t know, everything.
Portal looks like an amazing ammount of fun, but looks like the later levels could be quite painful and “rage-enducing”.
Team Fortress on the other hand looks so fucking cool because of the cartoony style. I loved the cartoony style that Evil Genuis had, it really had a large impact on the game for me, and was a major reason why I played it for as long as I did. I’m thinking TF2 will have a similar impact on me. I’ve never played Team Fortress before, atleast not with another person. When I acquired Half-Life (1) all those many, many, many moons ago, I had a go at it. It came free with, umm, Blue Shift I think, maybe Counter-Strike. Hell, maybe it came free with all of them. Anyway, I found it to be quite enjoyable, what little I remember of it.
So to recap, I’m really looking forward to Half-Life 2: Episode 2. I’m going to be so broke when it comes out.

In WEBSITE news, I’ve discovered the Captcha plugin for cutenews really doesn’t like me. A long time goal of dBainesTHREE was going to be wordpress integration of the gallery, but because of (at the time) lack of time and willingness I scrubbed out that goal and put it aside for db4. However, after Captcha denied me the ability to comment in IE6, Firefox and Opera, I am now more inspired to convert the gallery. So sorry to those that have commented on my art and I haven’t replied. I’ve tried, it just. wont. let. me! Sorry to those that tried to comment and couldn’t also. I’m not sure where the bug lies, nor am I willing to scrounge around cutephp.net for a decent fix. I’d rather just integrate the gallery in to WordPress, and since it was an original goal this is what I will be doing. I won’t be fixing the mess that is Cutenews.
I also upped the ante font-size for both the “Breeze” (default) and “Shiznit Productions” skins, since I’m getting old and my eye-sight is slowly but surely obliterating itself and the smallness was hurting my eyes. Thank god all this web2.0 bullshit is bringing back large fonts.